The next level and the next challenges

In a perfect world, a high population should be a good thing for a country. A country that accepts the divine injunction to go out there and multiply and fill the earth would be a nation of happy people, at least for doing the will of God. Few things ought to beat the joy of a country known for its teeming population. Such a country could train any number of soldiers to overwhelm the armies of hostile countries with niggling populations. It would have a large voting population too. I would imagine that in such a perfect world, all nations would strive to out do one another in their population growth.

But this not being a perfect world, nations refuse to turn the labour wards into Olympic competitions because population growth is not such a good thing. It is a bad thing, actually. The experts have been saying so for years now. Our estimated 198 million population is a source of increasing anguish and nightmare for the watchers and the planners of our national development. The experts have once more reminded us that we face a grim future in our economic and social development if we continue to do nothing about our proclivity for unrestrained procreation. We would fill the land all right but we would face the other side of the coin – more of our people would be extremely poor. The sheer burden of managing poverty would pour cold water on any thoughts of rhapsodising our achievements in the labour wards.

Here is a bit of what the experts have been saying about where we could inevitably be headed with some six or so children joining the national population every minute. Our population would explode, making it impossible for the Nigerian state to meet the basic needs of its people. You cannot be unaware of the fact that this is already happening. Potable water is a problem; electricity is a problem; and unemployment is a tough problem.

Our economy is growing at the rate of 1.9 per cent per annum while our population rate is galloping at a comfortable speed of 2.2 per cent per annum. A cursory glance at that shows that we are producing more mouths than we can feed. Given this inadvisable degree of our performance in the labour wards, last year our country shoved India aside as the poverty capital of the world. In addition to being the 419 capital of the world, our country accommodates the poorest people on planet earth.

To put it another way, more than half of our estimated population of 198 people – some 97 million – are living in extreme poverty. The beggars, old and young, on the streets in our towns and cities are not, truth be told, divine beings donning the toga of poverty to test your generosity and care towards the poor; they are fellow Nigerians driven to this option to merely survive from one day to another with the pittance thrown at them.

The general elections have been won and lost. Let us now resolve to face these population and poverty problems. President Buhari has promised to work harder in his second term in office. I take that to mean that the president would corral more of the looters of our common wealth and fill the jails with them. Nigeria sans looters would be a great country. But the president must now take seriously two of the greatest challenges that face the nation: the run away population growth and the growing rate of poverty. The huge implication here is that whatever policies he pursues would be effectively under mined by the demands of population growth and the growing poverty rate.

India and China, the two countries with the largest populations in the world, successfully responded to this twin challenge by enacting and policing population policies that helped to put a break on their annual population growth and lift millions of people out of the morass of poverty. Both countries introduced policies that limited a couple to one child. It helped them to manage the growing poverty induced by population growth. Today, they are the better for it.

The first attempt ever made by this country to check our population growth was during the Babangida administration when that government introduced the policy of limiting children to four per man. It was cynical and not seriously intended to slam the break on our population growth. What that government did was to steer clear of a simple problem compounded and confounded by ignorance, illiteracy and religion. Family planning is still a touchy issue here because preachers have remarkably managed to convince their ignorant followers that it is a diabolical plan to keep population of the adherents of particular faiths down to the advantage of another faith. It is nonsense, of course, but given the level of illiteracy and ignorance in the country it has a good number of takes, including even supposedly educated people who should appreciate what a population time bomb is.

The Nigerian state would continue to run away from addressing this problem at the peril of the nation. Poverty or extreme poverty serves no meaningful religious or ethnic purposes.  Whatever policy the government enacts would meet with some resistance. It happened in India and China. But it did not stop both countries from doing what they knew from the facts and figures before them. If they did it, we too could do it – ethnic, religious and ignorant resistance notwithstanding. Nations as well as individuals face the challenges of limited resources. We cannot have it both ways. Something has to give. What gives is life, empty life with a grim future.

In the 19th century the religious establishment argued that there was no need to curb population growth because for every mouth, God provided a pair of hands. In theory, two hands should be able to feed one mouth. It was, it is and it will remain nonsensical argument. The Nigerian state should wake up. A large population of extremely poor people is a millstone tied to the feet of our national development and progress.